Maybe, just maybe, there can be a national conversation on these topics long-ignored outside these communities. That’s not everything: it may be a first step, or it may get drowned out.

But at least, we are here.

But I’m not quite sure that without the neutral side of the Internet—the livestreams whose “packets” were fast as commercial, corporate and moneyed speech that travels on our networks, Twitter feeds which are not determined by an opaque corporate algorithms but my own choices,—we’d be having this conversation.

There are already a lot of conversations surrounding the tragic and complex problems in Ferguson, but plenty more need to happen. The White House has pledged to investigate the militarization of local police, for example. But it’s worth asking how many of these conversations would be happening had the algorithms that inform our conversations selected otherwise.